How to Make Old-Fashioned Lasagna

Old-fashioned lasagna needs to be made in a very particular way for maximum authenticity. Make old-fashioned lasagna with help from a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in this free video clip.

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Video Transcript

Hello, I'm Chef Alan Carlson of Italian Colors Restaurant in Oakland, California. Today, I'm going to show you how to make a simple version of the lasagna. We call it our Green Scarves Lasagna. So, first thing we do is we're going to make the filling. So, we've got some whole milk mozzarella, we're going to put in. Get all that in there. A little Parmesan cheese, equal parts of Parmesan with the mozzarella and then once again, equal amount of fresh ricotta cheese. These are all things you can buy in the store already ground up, ready to go; makes it nice and simple. Then, we add a little chopped parsley, it's about a tablespoon of chopped parsley to, I've, I'm thinking those are like third of cup of each of the cheeses. Throw that in. One egg will bind all these together. We add a little salt and pepper for taste. Little grated fresh nutmeg, mix all these up, takes just a second. This recipe originates from Joyce Goldstein and she's a cookbook author, has, had about four, five Italian cookbooks, maybe a few more than that, here our local Berkeley cookbook author. Its a great recipe. Then, we go to our spinach sheets, we're going to cut this into six equal squares. So, I usually just find a third and I fold it over again to the other third, find out where those are and I fold it in half. Nice and easy, it's not rocket science, but then at least you have the same size squares ever along on it. It's easier to see where they are. You ca double them up. Now, these we're going to cook in salted boiling water. They cook in about a minute and a half, two minutes. Okay. They cook pretty quickly. Just pull them out and throw them in the ice water to shock them. Alright, now that we have them shocked, they're cooked and they're cooling down really quickly. This keeps it from sticking together, releases the starch a little bit out of them. We will pull this out, lay them flat. Okay. We take a little bit of the ricotta cheese, put that right in the middle of it; I'll try to do it this way so you can see it. Do all four of these. Okay. Then, we just fold them in half. Okay. Once you have all your ingredients together, these things go together really fast, we put a little butter or you can spray Pam if you want in a bowl. We got some butter right here, we'll get that closer; just to keep it from sticking. You can use olive oil if you like. I like just to rub a bit of butter on there; I usually use melted clarified butter production on this. So, just little butter on there and we throw a little marinara in the bottom, in between the layers to keep these from sticking. We make what's called the bechamel. It's milk that's been thicken with a little bit of roux and has a flavor in of the onion that has little cloves in it and that gives it a nice smart pungent flavor to it. And this will go in the oven and it bakes in about eight to ten minutes. You can also microwave them for about three and a half minutes. They come out perfect, nice and hot all the way through. This is what the finished baked product looks like. You can either serve it in that, this bowl, it's piping hot, it's out of a 500-degree oven. You can see the bechamel spreads out when it melts. So, that is our Green Scarves Lasagna. Bon appetit! I'm Chef Carlson with Italian Colors Restaurant in Oakland, California, we look forward to cooking for you.